“The Natural world in the Siculo-Arabic waṣf poetry”, «Quaderni di Studi Arabi», Nuova Serie, thematic issue Natural world in Arabic textual culture (VII-XV centuries), F. Bellino (ed.), 18 (2023), pp. 62-81.

In waṣf poetry, the external world acquires a different consistency on the imaginary level, through a process of introjection that transforms the poet and his listener/reader into spectators of a shared mental vision by means of ekphrastic descriptions. The use of rhetorical devices allows the poet to manipulate the language in order to stimulate a multisensory experience in his audience, such as to induce a “mimetic perception”. In this paper, I will deal with the verbal representation of subjects and images from the natural world by focusing on the structural and stylistic analysis of several examples of waṣf poetry, composed in Sicily between the 4th/10th and 6th/12th centuries. These poems involve the principal motifs of the descriptive genre – gardens, fruits and flow- ers, landscapes and atmospheric phenomena – and sometimes propose a hermetic portrayal of the subject, described not according to direct perception but, rather, through its codified relationship with a traditional system of highly symbolised motifs and images. Do these poems comply with the “canonic” characteristics of the genre? Or, rather, do they reflect specific literary trends of the Sicilian context?